Abstract

While the tension between political equality and economic inequality is as old as democracyitself, a recent wave of scholarship has highlighted its acute relevance for democracy in Americatoday. In contrast to the view that legislative responsiveness favoring the auent is near toinevitable when income inequality is high, we argue that organized labor can be an eectivesource of political equality in the US House of Representatives. Our novel dataset combinesincome-specic estimates of constituency preferences based on 223,000 survey respondentsmatched to 27 roll-call votes with a measure of district-level union strength drawn fromadministrative records. We nd that local unions signicantly dampen unequal responsivenessto high incomes: a standard deviation increase in union membership increases legislativeresponsiveness towards the poor by about 6 to 8 percentage points. We rule out alternativeexplanations using district xed eects, interactive and exible controls accounting for policiesand institutions, as well as a novel instrumental variable for unionization based on history andgeography. We also show that the impact of unions operates via campaign contributions andpartisan selection. Our ndings underline calls to bring back organized labor into the analysisof political representation.